Review:
This show was definitely written by a bunch of people sitting around saying “You know what would be cool…”
“Yeah, giant robots that fight with magic.”
“Totally.”
“Wait, what if they had like four magic wands?”
“Too cool!”
“And then what if some of them looked like horses?”
“That’s fantastic!”
“And we’ll paint some red. Everyone loves red!”
“Awesome!”
And then the conversation starts to devolve and eventually we get to…
“And then the enemy just builds a freakin’ dragon and it burns the whole city down!”
Stunned silence for a moment.
“Woah! That is amazing! Write it! Write it!”
So yeah, that’s how I imagine the planning meeting for this story going and to be honest watching this show is rather like being a fly on the wall for one of those conversations. The participants look like they are having fun, but it isn’t fun.
We had one antagonist in the prince who was dispatched almost without a second thought but that kind of left room for the designer guy from the supposed bad guys to become an antagonist. Only we know absolutely nothing about him other than he is on a serious ego trip, which more or less puts him on par with our apparent hero, Ernesti, that we know nothing about other than he is good at everything because he was a programmer in a previous life.
And all this leaves me asking what the point of all of this is for the audience? Maybe the writers are having fun. Maybe Ernesti is having fun somewhere. But for the audience we are continuing to watch a series of events strung together only through narration about characters we know literally nothing about and have little reason to care.
Maybe I could just shrug and agree that a flying mechanical dragon is cool. Okay, it is cool. I love dragons. This one burnt a whole city in one breath and looks pretty awesome. Only, I know how this will go already. Even if I choose to buy into the cool factor this week, next week or the week after, Ernesti will tilt his head, come up with some weird idea and laugh as he rushed into battle and that dragon is going to end up either a flaming mess of scrap parts or Ernesti is going to take control of it. Either way, I’m pretty sure I am not going to be satisfied with how it goes.
Thanks for reading.
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Thanks,
Karandi James.
I totally agree with you here. I finally ended up dropping this show because I have better things to do with my life than try and piece together crappy writing and direction to try and make a sensible show out of this mess.
The art, animation, and music are really nice, though. Bit of a shame that the show itself is so lackluster. Also the mech fights towards the beginning were nice, as they did a great job showing the weight and bulk of the mechs themselves, however, that’s not really existent anymore, with the addition of mechs that can fly, jump, run like a horse, etc.
Yep, the mechs can just do whatever they need to do at this point which has kind of taken away any sense of tension. And I’m still wondering what happened to the beasts from back at the start of the series that were supposedly the reason the mechs existed. They haven’t made an appearance in a very long time.
That’s my aesthetic and kind of writing though ..
I kid. I’m getting kind of bored with this show. I thought it was ok at first when it was skipping through plot with “a few months later” during development stuff, but it really sucks when there is an actual war going on.
Yes, early on it can get away with that because we needed some background stuff and we needed the set up and skipping over things to get through it faster made sense. However, 11 episoes in, it is just coming off as lazy and obnoxious.
Bet nobody saw that coming… 😀 😀